


adage

by lauf_aiya_rson



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Marielda Spoilers, mind the tw's, miscellaneous others is my twilight mirage pc name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-09 01:57:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14706941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lauf_aiya_rson/pseuds/lauf_aiya_rson
Summary: 1. slow movements preformed with grace and fluidity.2. one of the typical combinations of a traditional ballet class, with slow, controlled movements.(fromwikipedialol)tw: trauma / being triggered / high key ptsd symptoms / flashbacks, body dysmorphia kind of?, depression, reference to violence, emetophobia/vomit, parents/divorce.marielda spoilers.this fic is equal parts me being salty about the fact that edmund hitchcock never dances in marielda and screaming at the blades in the dark trauma system





	adage

Edmund and Ethan Hitchcock had learned to dance when they were boys in Nacre. Their mother told the twins stories of the mansion in Hieron, where she played in the backyard and strange devices played stranger music.

She danced sometimes, and taught them the moves, wearing old cloth slippers with split leather soles she’d stolen when she moved here. She always said she’d learned from a city guard she later married, and she always said it with a smile.

 _Tombé-pas de bourrée-pirouette, land in a lunge with arms in second arabesque._ It took a while to get used to the terms, but once they did they slipped like silver from their tongues. It was a noble’s pastime, a court dance, and she never let them forget it. They started with ballet but moved on to ballroom dances, waltzes, foxtrots.

The year before she left Edmund didn’t remember her dancing at all.

When he and Ethan and their father moved to Marielda, the city of first light, land of volcanoes and black sand and the king-god Samothes, they brought dance with them. Then their father left, then they joined the cavalry, then they started stealing and gambling and flirting in Chrysanthemum Parish.

They learned to fight. They learned how to duel — a noble’s pastime, a court dance, and they never forgot it. They were two brown boys in a city of gold. And they already burned brighter than anyone else there.

  


* * *

Memoriam College was on fire and Edmund didn't care. The moment they got back, he walked into his room and locked the door and dragged a chair under the handle.

He started to cry.

He dropped down backward on the bed with a soft thud. His fists clenched, unclenched, and he dug his fingernails into his palms in a desperate attempt to convince himself that he was still here.

He was so unsteady. He’d never felt unsteady before, and now that he was here it felt like it would never end. Even thinking about doing anything made his throat close up.

So he just laid there. Didn’t get up except to pour himself drinks and choke down leftovers snuck from the kitchen at midnight and try to forget.

All down his left side was bruises and burns and scrapes. Each breath was his rib cage throbbing, and each breath was his chest cavity aching, and each breath was a reminder that he had to remember and that his heart had to _keep fucking beating_ , on and on and on and on and on.

And on, and on.

And on.

  


* * *

He worked through pliés, counting out the beats in silence, using the windowsill as a barre with the curtains drawn closed. He moved from first position to second position to fourth-opposite-fifth to fifth.

 _Focus_ — knees over toes, lift out of hips, shoulders down, rib cage in — all the little things. They were second nature for him by now, but he was off balance and his body was unfamiliar.

He shifted his weight too far back on his heels while doing a forward bend and came up teetering backward. He caught himself and gripped the windowsill harder.

He could feel his heart pounding in his chest and realized that he couldn’t remember if he had been breathing.

Once upon a time he knew how to dance to keep his mind from consuming itself on the things keeping him awake at night. Now it felt like he was just going through the motions.

He felt a headache coming on.

He sat down on the bed again, leaning slightly forward and chin down. His ribs still ached when he moved wrong and the image of a priest in a dark operating theatre was still burned into his brain, the way he’d curled up, the way bruises flowered under his crisp cavalry uniform.

If dance was about knowing bodies he knew his too well.

  


* * *

On day six he threw up out of the window, gagging on an empty stomach, and cried more. He was supposed to be a captain, damn it, he was supposed to be stronger than this, his parents had split up and he’d lost his father and been through half a war and _this?_ This was what hurt the most?

On day eight the nightmares started.

On day nine Miss Salary caught him on the ground in the stacks in the middle of the night, holding an orange. She helped him back to his room. She opened the window and passed him a cup of tea and bandaged his burns and put cooling ointment on his bruises. He said “thank you” in a very small voice and tried not to think of another night on which he was trapped and hurt and afraid.

On day twenty-three he heard Ethan gambling, desperately, on if he would come out, some ridiculous amount of money. And he tried to get up, he tried to open that door and talk to someone again, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t want to answer questions about if he was okay or what happened. He couldn’t talk about it. He couldn’t _think_ about it without shutting down.

On day twenty-four he sat up and forced himself to breathe properly for the first time in what felt like forever. It was midnight and he couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t dream. Couldn’t—

On day twenty-seven he opened the door to his bedroom.

  


* * *

He was teaching a class in the afternoon. It was hot. He was in a blue leotard faded to almost-gray, sitting on a stool in the corner watching the kids doing soutenu turns across the floor as a record played a tinny piano song. He said something about getting your feet together as soon as possible, spot your head, _point your toes, Dasiol._

He sighed, and led the class in a final stretch and reverence, and let them go.

“Hitchcock,” said Caroline Fair-Play as the rest of the class left. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” he said.

She gave him a look. “I’ve never seen you wear that to class before. You’ve seemed off ever since we got back.”

His usual ballet uniform was a sleeveless dark blue vest with a collar and gold buttons. He’d bought it from a weaver tailor in Helianthus. It was _very_ pretty.

He had taken one look at it and nearly had a meltdown.

“Being with me in Memoriam doesn’t get you any special treatment, Fair-Play.”

“Aubrey says you’ve been out for the last month and it’s been Ethan teaching both classes all this time.”

He stiffened. Tried to relax. “I’ve been in a bad way, alright?”

“Sure,” she said, and reached out. He flinched. Gods _dammit._

“Hitchcock,” she said again.

“It’s fine.”

She stopped herself from saying something and turned around and left.

  


* * *

He got back from the Tea Witches with Silas’s name in his throat and a sour taste in his mouth. _You kept saying his name,_ said Coral, and looked at him sideways.

He kept dreaming of gods in mansions. When he came back awake he would shake like he’d just had a nightmare and he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like the king-god Samothes had beat him up and left him to gasp in the dark alone.

_Silas._

He dreamed of broken windows and locks clicking open and explosions.

_Silas._

He woke and it took him a moment to remember that he wasn’t in the college anymore, he was safe, he was still here.

_Silas._

  


* * *

He could feel the nothingness inside him threaten to swallow him whole. There was despair and sorrow eating away at his bones, threatening to collapse him where he stood.

He’d been balancing on the edge of tears ever since Memoriam. You don’t survive as a thief if you’re soft, they said, but he didn’t feel soft. He felt half-cracked-open and not quite breathing.

(What they don’t say is that when the world is made of fire, softness is revolutionary. And that of course you’ll learn to live with it, you’ll learn to survive, you’ll learn to keep teaching and conning and laughing.)

(There are always good days.)

  


* * *

When he left Marielda he was feverish and drowning and afraid, and when he finally got to the mansion he was feverish and drowning and exhausted. Ethan was standing on the porch. The twang of guitar strings floated out from the woods.

It took time for him to tell the whole story to his brother. They hadn’t matched up in a while and he didn’t think they’d quite match up the same again. Ethan took his hand and they leaned against each other for a while, resting.

This had been their dream for the longest time.

Castille and Sige and Aubrey. Maybe one day he’d go back to Marielda and see them again.

Maybe this trauma — there, he said it — would never leave him. He’d changed but he wasn’t _broken._ People didn’t break.

Tonight, at least, he was okay, and he was full and warm. Not the kind of warm that burns worlds to the ground, but the kind that you gather around on long nights.

Tonight he danced.

**Author's Note:**

> anyway i'm on twitter @[notstarstuff](https://twitter.com/notstarstuff) :))


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